Beyond the inventory
A Sweep Tells You a Painting Is Gone. It Doesn't Tell You While It Is Going.
Portable readers solved the counting problem, and counting was the larger one. But a periodic inventory has a blind spot that matters more for artwork than for a laptop: it discovers a loss at the next sweep, which may be weeks after the loss happened.
For pieces that are irreplaceable rather than merely expensive, the useful moment is earlier. So the highest-value works were given a second layer: a BLE beacon, watched continuously by gateways, that raises an alarm the moment the piece moves.
A beacon on the frame, gateways on the wall
The beacon is fixed to the piece and reports its own motion state. Gateways in the room listen continuously — there is no scan, no operator and no schedule. The piece is either at rest or it is not.
A threshold per piece, not per building
Sensitivity is configured for each asset individually. A canvas on a partition wall in a corridor and a sculpture on a plinth do not tolerate the same amount of ordinary vibration — one setting for both would mean either false alarms or missed events.
Four states, not two
Alarm
Movement at or beyond the configured threshold, or a tamper flag from the beacon itself.
Moving
Motion detected, below the alarm threshold. Someone is working nearby, or a door slammed.
OK
At rest, reporting normally. The state the piece should be in almost always.
Offline
The beacon has stopped reporting. Not the same as OK — and that distinction is the point.
The fourth state is the one that separates a usable system from a decorative one. A beacon that went quiet is not a piece that is safe — a battery ran out, or something interfered, or someone removed the tag. Treating silence as "fine" is how monitoring systems fail without anyone noticing.
What security receives
The alarm arrives through the same notification channels as every other alert on the platform — the same escalation rules, the same acknowledgment, the same cooldown. It is not a separate console that someone has to remember to watch.
And the acknowledgment log records who responded and when. For a foundation holding pieces in trust, that record is not a convenience — it is the evidence that the custody obligation was met.
The two layers answer different questions. The portable reader answers "is everything where the register says it is?" — periodically, across the whole estate. The beacon answers "is this piece moving right now?" — continuously, for the few dozen items where the answer cannot wait. See asset loss prevention.
